Setting things up can be a bit of a hassle when it comes to launching a course — but it doesn’t have to be that way. We’ve released a new tool to help make at least part of this process easier and more transparent.

Creators will now see a new draft timeline at the top of your course draft curation content area.

There are six steps in this new timeline.

Our first step in the course creation process has a section where you enter your course basic information like title, category, difficulty level, language, tags etc. Creators only have to enter the required fields they’ve determined they need to bring their course to life. From there, creators can add a description to talk more about the course in general before moving on to adding requirements at step three. Once you are done with those three steps, you get to work on the curriculum and add sections and lessons, the nitty gritty part of the course. Next, based on your own pricing, we compute the fees creators should budget for (Plantoost’s 5% fee, and our payment processor’s roughly 5% fee).

Before you click the “Launch course now” button, we recommend double-checking your goal, campaign duration, and doing one last read through your rewards and shipping costs. Here’s a checklist to help you make sure everything is in order. And remember, just because your course has been approved doesn’t mean that you need to launch right away. Take your time and only go live once you’re ready.

When you’re ready to launch (with all the required fields taken care of), we recommend double-checking your course description, requirements, curriculum videos, and doing one last read through your pricing and discount. Once you’re ready, submit your course for review and let the waiting game begin! (Okay, it usually takes 3-5 working days if not less.) And remember, just because your course has been approved doesn’t mean that you need to launch right away. Take your time and only go live when you’re ready.

Our mission is to help bring creative courses to life, and we want to make sure every part of the process on Plantoost is straight forward and hassle-free. We’ve heard from creators that the course creation process can be confusing and challenging, potentially eating into the amount time and effort they need to actually get to the point where they’re ready for course submission. We built this new tool to add transparency around this and to help creators feel more ready and confident before they submit their course for review.

 

Here are some more recent improvements to Plantoost for creators.

Manage your course: Now when you manage your launched course, you can use the left sidebar to navigate to different parts of the course management process.This is part of our effort to make managing launched courses intuitive and easy-to-use.

Section numbering: Until now, when creators add their sections, the default section number would start at 1. With the new update, creators can choose to start their section with an “Introductory Section”. They can still choose the old format, but now they have the option to start with introductory section, potentially removing the confusion some students may get when browsing through the curriculum.